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[add comment] [edit] Volunteering [29 September 2015]Hi, I have been involved in the Australian pages and would like to continue to be. Thanks. Andrew
Hi, Can I help with British places - England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland (N&S). Thanks Colin Madge
Please count me in for US Midwestern and Mid-Atlantic states. (I hope we can find someone for Germany. I think right now at least in northwestern Germany there's a mish-mash of 1900-based and post WWII place heierarchy.) --Pkeegstra 19:57, 8 September 2012 (EDT)
goldenoldie 15:30, 9 October 2012 (EDT) I've been slow to volunteer to do Ontario places, but I wanted to finish the first run of sorting out the Place pages for southern Ontario before doing so. Otherwise it would be one of those projects that gets left "almost finished". I might feel comfortable doing the Maritime Provinces too, but Western Canadian Provinces use a different municipal structure and I am not sufficiently familiar with it to want to touch the entries, unless the error is quite simple. I should be able to work with UK pages, seeing as that's where I live, but my British "sources" knowledge is not as good as it might be. Colin, I'll be glad to give a second opinion when you need it. A question: Are pages we ought to sort out directed to us by some bot, or do we have to find them for ourselves? Others may have noticed the great number of references to Place:Godo, Anpachi, Gifu, Japan, caused by people writing "Do" for "ditto" when referring back from a later census to an earlier one when the family never moved. I suppose this is a problem you are all familiar with, but it sure got a giggle out of me.
I would like to volunteer for Place patrol. My personal research areas are mid-Atlantic through the Midwest, but I see that there is a volunteer already assigned to those areas. Is there a need for a 2nd volunteer for these areas? Or is there another area I could help with in the United States? I am fairly new to WeRelate, but I believe I have a fair grasp of the location / place guidelines, and am always eager to learn more. Thank you.--RWMeyer 01:03, 29 September 2015 (UTC)
[add comment] [edit] Problematic place: Wales, England [22 November 2012]I happened to notice a couple of usages of "Wales, England" in event place fields, which stood out since of course Wales is distinct from England. Some Americans don't know that, though, and end up appending ", England" to Wales to indicate where this odd place is located. (They are probably using "England" as a synonym for them British islands.) I wasn't particularly surprised until I saw that WeRelate had a Place:Wales, England, and that it actually redirected to Place:Wales, Yorkshire, England! This is a problem that needs fixing, I think. Most of the usages of "Wales, England" are probably meant to refer to the region/country of 3,000,000 rather than the Yorkshire village of 6,000. A spot check shows some clear cases (Person:Edward Edwards (10), Source:Mathias Family Ancestry in Nebraska and Wales) and many likely cases (Person:Mary Owens (4), Person:Geoffrey De Bohun (2), Person:Phoebe Rice (1), Person:Ynyr Gwent (1), Person:Maria Thomas (20), Person:Edward Owen (10), etc.). There are also cases which look like someone accidentally accepted a system suggestion that the intended "Wales, England" was in Yorkshire, but maybe not too much can be done about that. Perhaps Place:Wales, England should be changed to redirect to Place:Wales. I don't really know how things work, but maybe instead Place:Wales, England could be a sort of "disambiguation" page that pointed out the problem and pointed to the two possible places. There are also cases where the page text is "Wales, England" but the underlying wikilink goes to Place:Wales, Yorkshire, England; I would hope that those could be changed also. --Robert.shaw 17:21, 21 August 2012 (EDT)
Places in Monmouthshire ought to be inspected with care. The county is supposed to be in Wales but some people will say it is/was in England. Wikipedia puts it as follows:
The dispute went on until 1974! But, really, it ought to be in Wales. --goldenoldie 10:34, 22 November 2012 (EST) [add comment] [edit] Places with broken / incorrect links [25 November 2012]Hi Is it possible to do a search for places with broken / incorrect names etc to clear up. I can imagine there are a few, but if I knew how to find them I would help to clear them and put corrections in place eg Place:Gwynned, North Wales, England Thanks--Colin Madge 08:21, 22 November 2012 (EST)
Thanks - will have a look and make some changes--Colin Madge 13:59, 23 November 2012 (EST) Jennifer said "Well, there is a Special Page for Wanted Pages. However, this can be difficult to use since it is flooded with things like descriptions in place fields." What fun! I am proceeding with housecleaning the problems of [[Place:Mara, Ontario, Ontario, Canada]] and the villages and cemeteries inside it. Each one has 57 different varities of inconsistencies. --goldenoldie 04:15, 25 November 2012 (EST) I noticed yesterday that Colin was redirecting some of the red-linked places like Colchester South Tp, Essex, Ontario, Canada > Colchester, Essex, Ontario, Canada
Colcehster South, Essex, Ontario, Canada would have been the correct redirect. Colchester [municipality] did not replace Colchester South (and a few other places) until 1999. This is noted on the pages for Colchester South, Colchester and Essex [county]. --goldenoldie 08:48, 25 November 2012 (EST)
Goldenoldie, I noticed that you added a couple of alt names to Place:Mara, Ontario, Ontario, Canada. When adding alt names, you don't want to add the full hierarchy, only the part of the alt name that corresponds to that place page. So, for Mara, you could add Mara Twp and for Ontario County you can add Ontario Co. - but you don't want to add they whole Mara Twp., Ontario Co., Ontario under Mara. --Jennifer (JBS66) 06:47, 25 November 2012 (EST) Thanks, I'll adjust the place pages. A bit of new learning happening. --goldenoldie 08:48, 25 November 2012 (EST) Slap on the wrist Will not touch anything with Ontario in title. Colin--Colin Madge 15:01, 25 November 2012 (EST) [add comment] [edit] Redirects [4 June 2017]I am not sure creating redirects is the best approach to fixing place page red-links. One recent example is redirecting Place:Halifax to Place:Halifax, Yorkshire, England. However, there are other Halifax's in the world - Nova Scotia, Virginia, etc. Wikipedia handles this by creating disambiguation pages such as WP:Halifax. However, disambiguation pages cause problems for the place matching software. I am going to bring this up as a point to the Overview Committee to see what is the best approach in dealing with this. For now, I would suggest not creating redirects solely for the purpose of cleaning up the red-linked Wanted Pages. --Jennifer (JBS66) 16:31, 27 November 2012 (EST)
I may be guilty of wrongly linking Places in redirects. I will stop amending these places until someone suggests away of getting the "rubbish" out of WeRelate. They majority of this has been uploaded via a Gedcoms and the contributor has done nothing !! They have sat here for at least 3 years(2008/2009). Over to the committee - can a bot clean up ? - I am only trying to help and don't see many others helping just criticizing.--Colin Madge 14:53, 28 November 2012 (EST)
Thanks for the clarity - I appreciate that redirects is not the solution to everything but I am finding it fustrating to amend someones data who last used the site in 2008. Uploaded the gedcom and has not been seen since.--Colin Madge 13:30, 29 November 2012 (EST)
I'm glad to see the button is pushed on the cache of "Wanted places" every week. I've been working on a group in one particular geographical area and amongst the other changes Place:St Columbkille's Cem., Uptergrove, Ontario Co. Canada West has gone down from 336 to 89! This week I have made a list of the ones I've been working on so I can see the progress next Sunday. But I have been wondering about a couple of entries in the list that seem perfectly plausible: Place:At Sea and Place:Atlantic Ocean. I've found both in census records. What's the policy on these? How about if every keen WR member removed 5 Place:UNKNOWN, 2 Place:Farmer and 1 Place:Blacksmith every day? Would we get somewhere? --goldenoldie 04:32, 3 December 2012 (EST)
[add comment] [edit] Another problematic place: Ireland [23 June 2015]This week I've been fixing up places and cemeteries based around Place:Mara, Ontario, Ontario, Canada--all contributed by one person who probably never inspected his/her contribution to WR after completing it. Many "tops of trees" for this lot arrived in Mara from Ireland in the first half of the 19th century and for many the county of origin was known. These birthplace are given as, for instance, "Co. Cork" or "Co. Tyrone". Because of the way our place database has been set up, adding Ireland to the county brings up "County Cork, Republic of Ireland" or "County Tyrone, Northern Ireland", respectively, obliging a second correction to bring the place back to Ireland, the country from which they came. Ireland did not split until 1922. Shouldn't it therefore be the primary place in our database rather than the two entities that it split into? And, because all three places are top-tier places, doesn't the change have to be made by an administrator? I also notice that only one or two of the counties of the Republic have the "Co." abbreviation in their list of "Alternate names". (The Northern Irish counties have "Co" because it is a recognized Post Office expression.) I will now add "Co." to the Republic lot so that this most common way of expressing a birthplace can be recognized by our software. One other problem. Tipperary split into North Tipperary and South Tipperary in 1898. It's really going to take a lot of geographical knowledge to know how to put those ancestors in their proper place. <sad smile>
Because ancestors occurred in the past rather than in the present I would prefer to overlay the modern national realities on the former structure--the opposite philosophy to yours. "Located in Ireland from year [blank] to 1922" followed by "Also located in: Republic of Ireland|1922|" indicates there was a change in the 20th century. There could still be WR pages for the Republic and for Northern Ireland expressing the change on the opposite lines. What arrangement has been used for other countries whose status and names have changed in the 20th century, e.g. the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Russia/USSR/Russia-again, Israel, and former colonial regimes in Africa? Tipperary's 1898 split is a fly in the ointment. (I didn't know there was a North and South Tipperary till this morning.) I think I noticed that the box "Located in Republic of Ireland from year ...." was empty for Tipperary but filled in for other counties. Perhaps putting 1922 there might help (even if it isn't exactly right). I tend to dislike the simple "child" and "parent" explanation in the "See also" box. One needs a date and a few facts about the parentage. Working through the Ontario counties and their changes in municipal structure between 1970 and 2006 (every county was different), I got into a routine and filled in the before and after arrangements for each place page. Took a while, but it makes an easy reference for someone wondering where to look for vital statistics when today's municipalities are different from those that were used when their ancestor was hatched, matched or dispatched. Your experience with Half Moon Bay is no surprise to me. People always considered they lived in Scotland or Ireland or Wales or England. Occasionally they might think "Britain" but Great Britain was only England, Wales and Scotland. Ireland was always a separate island. Great Britain and Ireland was a mouthful (and would have taken a lot of chipping on a tombstone). The United Kingdom is a modern idiom (came in either in 1922 when Ireland broke away, or in 1931 when the Commonwealth replaced the Empire). --goldenoldie 10:09, 1 December 2012 (EST)
Buck-passing seems to be the name of the game. Anyone else want to join the discussion? --goldenoldie 12:07, 1 December 2012 (EST)
My own experience (perhaps I should say genealogicial exposure) to Ireland is very slight, so I don't want to get involved in the hierarchical structure problem. However, on Saturday I added the Wikipedia sections on structure to each of the Republic of Ireland counties, so the names of the baronies and in some cases the townlands and/or the parishes are now at the fingertips of users. I hope this will be useful. I am glad to hear that you, Jennifer, consider holding on to the 1900-rule for Ireland. Many North Americans know their ancestors came from a specific county and also are sufficiently aware of 20th-century history to know that they did not come from places named either the Republic of Ireland or Northern Ireland. It is a welcoming gesture to new faces not to turn the red light on (i.e. the place name turning red) when they enter the birthplace of their furthest back known ancestor. Only ten years ago it was much harder to trace Irish ancestors than it is today. It is not an easy part of genealogy to get to grips with. Sorry about the buck-passing comment. I saw the message just as I was about to leave the computer to provide for the needs of my present-day family and was tempted to say something quickly.--goldenoldie 08:37, 3 December 2012 (EST) For what it's worth, I looked at my transcriptions of tombstones in New Jersey with Irish places of birth and more than 90% of them, when they give something more specific than a county, give a parish (presumably the civil parish) as the place of birth, not the townland.--Acurley 18:00, 18 October 2014 (UTC) What about using the 1901 Census (so acknowleding the 1900 rule) and use 'Townland, Civil Parish, County, Ireland', or 'Civil Parish, County, Ireland'?--Acurley 14:20, 8 December 2014 (UTC) It doesn't appear there has been much traction on this issue. Since most research will be done pre-independence, most place references would need to be piped to display the accurate name of the place where the event occurred (plain old Ireland instead of the Republic). But since I have not had to deal with the Irish sources (I'm only looking at some of the Peers), I don't know if there is any advantage in keeping them in the current structure. Also, could we drop the word "County"? We don't include that in the U.S. places even though it is a part of the official name. -Moverton 18:43, 23 June 2015 (UTC) The official Irish census site uses Townland, Civil Parish [strictly speaking DED, but this is usually a civil parish], County. The enumerator's abstract page has ten possible subdivisions of a county, but they chose Townland and Civil Parish for the index. Thus you have: Census Years 1901 Limerick [county] Mahoonagh [civil parish] Curragh [townland]. It gets a little complicated when it is a question of a city, but the cities really don't cause confusion. The townland page could list the other civil divisions of which the townland is a part.--Acurley 01:16, 24 June 2015 (UTC) [add comment] [edit] Disambiguation pages [3 December 2012]The software uses the place pages internally as a database for matching gedcom's and other places. I worry that if we create new disambiguation pages for places, that could make it more difficult for the software to match the real place pages -- it might match the disambiguation pages instead. How do we feel about leaving places that are ambiguous as red links?--Dallan 14:06, 3 December 2012 (EST)
[add comment] [edit] History of the 1900 rule [3 December 2012]When I created the place pages initially, I had data from FamilySearch's Family History Libary Catalog (FHLC), the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Place Names, and a bunch of places extracted from Wikipedia. About 50% of the places in the FHLC were not in either of the other two sources, so I used that as my reference point, and tried to merge the other two datasets into the FHLC dataset as best I could. I discovered that the FHLC dataset generally chooses a particular year for its place hierarchy, though the year chosen varies by country. I couldn't find any resource where they said which year was used for each country, so I had to determine the year based upon the data. If you go to the country's homepage, the year chosen for the jurisdictional hierarchy is listed in the "How places are organized" section (at least it is for the major countries). In general, the year chosen by FHLC was in the early 1900's (France was an exception unfortunately -- its year is in the 1960's). In order to have a simple rule for WeRelate, I started asking people to title places according to the hierarchy they appeared under in 1900 - hence the 1900 rule. Do all places follow this rule? No, because the FHLC did not religiously follow this rule, and I wasn't expert enough to correct them. I corrected a few place hierarchies to follow this rule when I knew how to fix them, but I'm still not an expert in place history, which is why I'm turning this over to people like you who know a lot more about place history than I do.--Dallan 14:06, 3 December 2012 (EST)
[add comment] [edit] Possibility of re-running place matching [7 December 2012]As an alternative to manually editing a bunch of old pages with red links, I could write something so the system would automatically try to match red-linked places against the latest place database and edit the pages to turn red links into blue ones when it found a match. Would that be useful?--Dallan 14:06, 3 December 2012 (EST)
Places like Amsterdam and Halifax are always going to cause trouble, so I go along with Jennifer in hesitating to install an all-over tweak to software. But could we give you groups of red-inked places all from the same country (or even from the same state or province) to work with, and then it would be on to the next set of problem places? There are three places in England--all situated practically at my doorstep--that are phrased with the town in UPPERCASE and no commas between the town, the county and "England". This lot will be a special case because of the lacking commas no matter what. (There may be more than three but these are ones I have seen in the top 1000). --goldenoldie 16:32, 3 December 2012 (EST) How about targetting Place :Unknown, Place : Farmer, Place : ?, Place : Y, More targeted approach Thanks--Colin Madge 13:14, 4 December 2012 (EST)
This looks good, but we must allow for blank fields in the finished article, i.e. farmer goes into Description and Place stays blank. --goldenoldie 12:11, 7 December 2012 (EST) [add comment] [edit] Churches as Places - what is the rule? [22 November 2022]I know you should not have a church as a place - St Marys, Chepstow.Chepstow in Wales the place. But you can have ,for example, a cemetery as a place , which is also a church. Lots of examples in England, Scotland, Wales etc. Gedcoms uploaded for marriages/christenings/baptistisms etc - have had churches . Should these be amended ? to the place name and the chuch added seperate.--Colin Madge 12:39, 4 December 2012 (EST)
I understand (and agree with) the rule about not creating churches. So what do we do with the following existing Place pages?:
The first 3 of these places have been used as burial places - which would be comparable to using a cemetery page. At least one has also been used as a marriage place, which is not consistent with the level of detail of marriage place for most couples. I can see the argument for keeping them to be used as a burial place (for people who were buried in the actual church, not the cemetery). However, to do so, we have a place type called "Place of worship", which has seemed to encourage some users to create other places of worship. If we're going to keep the place type, we need to monitor for new Place pages being inappropriately created for places of worship. (I just deleted a couple and another couple need to be deleted once references are updated.) My preference would be to delete these pages and remove the type "Place of worship", since our guidelines are quite clear on not creating Place pages for churches. People buried in the church would have to be updated to say they were buried in the town (with the church name in the description field). Thoughts? BTW: The rule/guideline should be updated to "do not create Place pages for places of worship (e.g., churches, Quaker meeting houses, synagogues, mosques). A couple of the new Place pages I just deleted were for mosques, and I suspect that Quakers might not consider their meeting houses to be churches. I can make this change once we have a resolution to the question above. --DataAnalyst 16:03, 30 October 2022 (UTC)
[add comment] [edit] Invernesshire [5 December 2012]Every time the true Scot in me sees the "County of Inverness" spelled as above it niggles. Because there are actually 3 s's, the spelling is Inverness-shire.
--goldenoldie 12:01, 5 December 2012 (EST)
[add comment] [edit] Newfoundland [9 December 2012]In sorting out red-inked places, I just found a family living in Newfoundland before it joined Canada as Place:Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada in 1949. Newfoundland is an alternate placename for Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, but can we put it in as a place in itself? I have at least one new community to add and I may find others. Just to save you running to other sources: From 1583 to 1907 Newfoundland's formal name was the Colony of Newfoundland and between 1907 and 1949 it was the Dominion of Newfoundland. Labrador was a part of Newfoundland during that time, but there was little population outside the native people until the mid 20th century. (Mother country: Great Britain, of course) --goldenoldie 05:07, 9 December 2012 (EST)
[add comment] [edit] New France [25 December 2012]As things stand WR does not recognize Quebec as a place until 1791 when the Constitutional Act separated the Province of Quebec into Upper Canada (current southern Ontario) and Lower Canada (current southern Quebec). It was well-settled by French speaking people during the 17th century and was a colony of France, known as New France (along with all the rest of France's North American holdings) until 1763. In 1763 it was taken over by the British who named it "The Province of Quebec" and considered it one of their standard colonies until 1791. New France was a very well organized territory. Roman Catholic Church records are available for descendants wishing to do their genealogy. I think it deserves to be added to our places. We will need "The Province of Quebec" to cover 1763-1791 as well. New France is a pretty good explanation. Incidently, how does one present a French acute accent without cutting and pasting? --goldenoldie 15:38, 17 December 2012 (EST)
New France and the 1763-1791 regime were different in that they had different sovereign states running them. Technically, New France included the lands along the Mississippi as well as Quebec. After 1763 the ordinary French-speaking people of Quebec and their government treated each other with a fair amount of distrust. User:RDMoffat and I have been discussing this on our talk pages. The "Contained In" box is the problem. I was wondering if we could use a supplementary page for Great Britain (or England before 1703), France, Germany, the Netherlands, and others that could be used as the top hierarchical page for their colonies abroad, but would be separate from the top layer of their place within their internal territory. I haven't examined how the Netherlands--Indonesia situation is being handled, but the users must have come to some conclusions. I am holding off introducing a family to WR until the Quebec before 1791 gets sorted. Can't have them living somewhere that doesn't exist.
Seasons greetings
[add comment] [edit] Watts twp, Perry, PA [24 December 2012]For some reason Place:Watts, Perry, Pennsylvania, United States doesn't exist. Here's the WP page. --Robert.shaw 21:37, 21 December 2012 (EST)
[add comment] [edit] Place "types" [4 January 2013]Is there a provision for places named by other cultures or religions separate from the normal geographic designation? My question concerns Native American place names and Quaker place names. Concerning a specific example, there is a Quaker area called Chichester, Chester county, Pennsylvania, which does not correspond to modern geographic locations, but in many Quaker resources, this is how they referenced this part of Pennsylvania. Is there a Type when creating a new place that handles these?--Khaentlahn 22:09, 22 December 2012 (EST)
I have been tempted to call them "settlements". --goldenoldie 04:35, 2 January 2013 (EST)
[add comment] [edit] Atlantic Ocean and "At Sea" [7 January 2013]Not common places of birth and death (and marriage for that matter), but they did happen.
Could we give them a Place Page or two? "Place:At sea during the crossing to France (69 links)" deals with a specific unfortunate sea voyage in 1759.
I go along with your suggestion of an "at sea" page with more details if known in the description box.--goldenoldie 07:50, 2 January 2013 (EST)
[add comment] [edit] Place:Carpenter [7 January 2013]Quite relervant for the time of year - Joseph and all that !! Can any thing be done to delete from places ??--Colin Madge 12:39, 5 January 2013 (EST)
Cannot anything be done automatically ?? To save some poor person deleting 1,351 manually ?? Colin
Can't remember how many "carpenters" there are, but there are 1351 "farmers" and all sorts of other places of this ilk! See "Possibility of re-running place matching [7 December 2012]" on Place Patrol and a few articles preceding. --goldenoldie 13:58, 5 January 2013 (EST) [add comment] [edit] Wanted pages [10 February 2013]Could the red-linked Wanted pages be reorder on a seperate page, but botton up rather than Top down.Smaller ones at the top. Might be alot of quick wins. --Colin Madge 12:29, 9 February 2013 (EST) [add comment] [edit] Place:Hungary [5 mrt 2013]
I understand from this that Hungary is classified according to the 1900 standard. But the cities that after 1920 no longer lie in Hungary, got on WeRelate also a location in the country today. With the result that a city is listed twice. On the page “Eastern European Place Renaming” is written “a place to organize ideas”.
[add comment] [edit] Place:Gömör, Hungary [5 mrt 2013]There is a problem by Place:Gömör, Hungary should be renamed to Place:Gömör-Kishont, Hungary (the places must move along), but there is already a Place:Gömör-Kishont, Hungary. I have not moved, so you can see the old situation. Administrators have the right tool to fix this. Groet, --Lidewij 07:24, 3 March 2013 (EST)
[add comment] [edit] Place description list [3 March 2013]Could the place description "Borough" be revised to "Borough, burgh"? Scotland uses burgh instead of town or municipality. This addition would allow the quick identification. The Scots even had "police burghs" and "royal burghs" and "burghs of barony"--I am still getting my head around the varying definitions. All were dispensed with in 1975 by the Local Government (Scotland) Act 1973 although they are still used in descriptive material. --goldenoldie 09:29, 3 March 2013 (EST) [add comment] [edit] Places in France ... an horror ! [15 apr 2013]It's a very big problem ! What a lot of errors ! The information from Getty "inhabited place" is very ridiculos ! All is mixed up and confused ! Old communes with alt names, etc ... Only one terrible example : Place:Amiens, Somme, France ... "Inhabited place" + "Marche-Allowarde" (it is an existing/current commune, not near Amiens but near Roye, in the department Somme) + "Petit-Saint-Jean" (only an old parish of Amiens ... why the other parts and parishes of Amiens are not given ?) The number of departments has also changed (region of Paris + Corse) since some years ! Why was the date "in the 1960's" taken and adopted as reference ? Amicalement - Marc ROUSSEL - --Markus3 11:16, 12 April 2013 (EDT)
[add comment] [edit] Places in France [15 April 2013]Marc the hierarchy of the places in France, is incalculable. Yugoslavia and Poland are much more difficult. The place of 1900 is a priority. In 1900, France was divided into political municipalities. France is divided into political municipalities from ± 1790. The name of the municipalities is usually the name of the main place of/in the municipality. The municipalities are the basis of WeRelate. From 1790 notes/acts of birth, were married and death in those municipalities. The names of the political communities are important for the genealogist. For the separation of church and state administration (± 1790) was carried out by the parishes and notary services. The situation for 1790/1900 I usually try to take in the description. It is important that one understands faster the info in werelate, the place wording in official acts/records. So when former municipalities, it is important to note the dates. For the Netherlands, the names, municipality, former municipality, city, village, neighborhood, hamlet, etc. For France, I think that should. We should discuss what needed. Groet,--Lidewij 05:48, 15 April 2013 (EDT)
Marc, I also make use of translation tools. 45 to 50 years ago, I have learned three languages at school.(fr,De,En) I'm dyslexic, and instead focus on what languages less important.
[add comment] [edit] "Type" for places [15 April 2013]Moved from here Where can I find all the offered possiblities for "Type" on the place pages ? For example, I don't know if "ancient city" is correct for a village that was a "commune" until 1972. The village exists today, with the houses and people, but it "joins" an other little village to make a new place for the administration. Does it perhaps mean "abandoned or destroyed locality" ? Thanks ! Amicalement - Marc ROUSSEL - --Markus3 15:48, 12 April 2013 (EDT)
Marc - Please can I check - "Inhabited" means "habité"; "Inhabité" - "Un-inhabited". See http://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/uninhabited#Anglais AndrewRT 14:37, 15 April 2013 (EDT)
City, Town, Village, Community, City or Town, Town or Village, and Inhabited place are all "grouped together" under the heading Inhabited Place in the right column. --Jennifer (JBS66) 15:28, 15 April 2013 (EDT) [add comment] [edit] Places for farms [5 August 2013]Could anyone here help with this query please? AndrewRT 14:48, 5 August 2013 (EDT) [add comment] [edit] Gotlands, Gotland, Sweden [8 September 2013]In response to this support question, I was trying to rename Gotlands, Gotland, Sweden to Gotland, Sweden. I received a "Deletion required" message, and I'm wondering if this is the proper approach. --Jennifer (JBS66) 16:20, 8 September 2013 (EDT) [add comment] [edit] Volunteer for Cemeteries in Canada [18 October 2014]I'm willing to help out by reviewing cemetery pages in Canada.--RGMoffat 19:22, 23 September 2014 (UTC) Shortly after volunteering I learned i need to have major surgery before the end of the month. Not sure when I will be up to speed again. Rick--RGMoffat 18:24, 18 October 2014 (UTC) Welcome! We'll add you to the list and you can do whatever you can. --pkeegstra 20:40, 18 October 2014 (UTC) [add comment] [edit] Quoting from Wikipedia [31 May 2016]It's great to have a source from which we can copy a paragraph or two describing a place or its history, but we ought to remember that Wikipedia descriptions are written by volunteers like ourselves. They may be experts in their fields, but they may not be experts in expressing themselves. I just came across this sentence in Mortlake which is on the River Thames in London, England.
The Boat Race is one of those big events in the British sporting calendar, just like the Superbowl in American football or The Masters in golf. For that reason it deserves a quick mention in Wikipedia if not necessarily in WeRelate. But it is a one-afternoon event and ending the sentence "every April" infers it takes place over a period of a few days at least. (Not only that, but this year it was in late March.) The facts might be better expressed as follows:
Some Wikipedia writers string an awful lot of sentences together like this. They also talk about villages or towns when they really mean the area defined by the local administration boundaries--which might incorporate an area beyond the built-up centre. This leaves the WeRelate user whose predecessors lived on farms in a quandary--just where did they live? What church did they travel to for a baptism or where did they report a birth to civil authorities? How was their address defined in a census? Another problem with Wikipedia (and here my experience with their British section is really showing) is their incessant discussions of places as found in the Domesday Book (of 1086). The writers are reporting history and that's all very good, but we are looking at genealogy. Very few of us are tracing our own lines back to the 11th century (complete with sources, don't forget). It can take several paragraphs of a Wikipedia history section to get down to what occurred in the 18th and 19th centuries--the stuff that may give us a clue as to why our forebears were in the place to begin with--particularly if their parents spent their lives somewhere else. Then, when Wikipedia does get to the 19th century it covers a murder that reached the national press, leaving us without a clue as to how the rest of the population earned their living (or didn't). If that is what you find in a Wikipedia history section, it's not worth repeating. WeRelate users need only a short review of a place's history (with links to where they can find more). However, if the Wikipedia writer traces the lord of the manor through two or more generations, or mentions someone who made a scientific discovery, or authored a famous book--that could be clues to someone's genealogical questing--and worth quoting. For these reasons I decided a long time ago that quoting Wikipedia verbatim is not always a good policy. All the same I want to give credit where credit was due. My introduction to a semi-quoted piece from Wikipedia is :the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia and the credit template {{wikipedia-notice|---}} remains at the bottom of our WeRelate page. We should use {{moreinfo wikipedia|---}} more. It is possible to add a sentence to this template indicating what part of an article has a really meaty bit which is worth a read if not a duplication in WeRelate.--Goldenoldie 07:08, 26 May 2016 (UTC)
Sounds good to me.--SkippyG 01:33, 31 May 2016 (UTC) That does seem a better method.--Rhian 07:25, 31 May 2016 (UTC) [add comment] [edit] Committee Roll Call & Update [2 December 2016]Hello - I am in the process of updating the information on the status of our admin structure and maintenance committees. The members of this committee are currently listed as:
Please respond here to let us know that you are still active on this committee and whether or not you wish to continue in this capacity. To help us quantify the work that is being done, please include a brief list of the tasks that you perform most frequently and an estimate of the average amount of time per month that you currently spend on these tasks. Also, this committee is in need of a new Liason. Would one of you be willing to step into that role?
I 'm still willing to work on cemeteries in Ontario, and as time permits, the rest of Canada. PS , I think I am the RBMoffat above, but the second initial is G. Rick. --RGMoffat 20:13, 2 December 2016 (UTC)
I'd love to add my name. I've done a lot in Ohio & Pennsylvania, New York, Michigan, adding twps, cemeteries, etc. and New England, also. Neal --SkippyG 21:26, 2 December 2016 (UTC)
Likely easier to describe the sources at my disposal: more than a dozen Ohio county histories, several Pennsylvania county histories, a fairly well-stocked library Genealogy Dept. in the first seat of the Ohio Connecticut Western Reserve a few blocks away. Also, I have numerous friends who are still active genealogical librarians, Ohio & elsewhere, willing to scour their records with mild nudging. I also visit The Archives here where all the early records of incorporation are housed for the Western Reserve, which includes all the present day counties of the aforesaid. Neal--SkippyG 23:40, 2 December 2016 (UTC) [add comment] [edit] Strange place page [7 March 2017]Place:Marriage of Samuel to Martha Upham in Malden, Massachusetts, United States Would someone on Place Patrol please look at the above page created by a relatively new contributor. Just came home from a short hospital stay, and I'm not ready to tackle this one. Neal--SkippyG 19:23, 7 March 2017 (UTC)
[add comment] [edit] Found Suspect Place Pages [14 March 2017]Since I don't normally review place names unless they are Townships or Cemeteries, I ran across a few that I'm pretty sure need to be deleted, but I thought it would be better to bring them here and let the experts handle them. Place:Bergstrom AFB, Travis, Texas, United States Thank you!--khaentlahn 22:48, 13 March 2017 (UTC)
[add comment] [edit] Use of Rhode Island Cemetery Designation Numbers as WR Placenames [13 May 2017]I received the following note from cos1776 last week advising that there were close to 100 pages in the "Wanted Category" page under the Surname-in-Place heading of "Category:Knight in Historical Cemetery." Rather than highlight this maintenance issue as a future WeRelate Crowdsourcing Challenge as suggested, I thought it might be more appropriately handled as a Data Quality Improvement maintenance task or as a WeRelate:Place patrol issue.
In the past week progress has been made. At this point there are fewer than 50 of the Rhode Island Historical Cemetery Commission designation number placenames remaining (User:Cos1776 and I quite a few many of the placenames), but we could use further attention in correcting the remaining placename entries. As a cross-reference, the RI designation numbers can be searched at this RIHCC Cemetery Code search page. In addition to the updated page mentioned by User:Cos1776 above, examples of some of the pages I recently corrected are Person:Andrew Knight (41), Person:Florence Knight (61), Person:George Knight (228), and Person:Mary Knight (492). Thanks for your attention and assistance. --BobC 16:38, 13 May 2017 (UTC) [add comment] [edit] Wanted pages [2 July 2017]The discussion above, dealing with Rhode Island cemeteries, contained several comments that dealt with place pages and editing in general--and pointed me to some interesting pages of WR that I never knew about. But it also led me to take another look at Admin>Special pages>Wanted Pages, a list, for the most part, of incorrectly named places and sources. At present there are 1000 places in the list with the number of links to a page descending from almost 4,000 to 46. Thankfully, the quantities at the top of the list have decreased since I first joined WR in 2012. But there is still a lot to do. However, could many of the Wanted Pages could disappear with cautious use of #redirect? As a trial, I took Place:St. Stephen, N.B. Canada, checked out its county in New Brunswick with Wikipedia, redirected it to Place:St. Stephen, Charlotte, New Brunswick, Canada, and removed a wanted place with 178 links. The redirect is now listed in the "What links here" list for St. Stephen in Charlotte County along with all the Persons for which it was used, and one could work from there to improve the work of User:Elainep which is highly detailed (if Alfred Price is anything to go by). How many other places could be removed from the current list with a redirect? I noticed "Place:Birmingham, Warwickshire", "Place:Philadelphia", and "Place:Indiana USA". All these might still be red-linked on the Person pages, but the person pages might be found more easily in "Search". Many others might need a fair bit of extra checking by someone who knows German and Germany, or Quebec and its geography. One of the entries was "Auschwitz". These 60 people really deserve a tidying of their pages. But, is redirecting a good idea? I'd like some comments, please. --Goldenoldie 09:50, 17 May 2017 (UT)
I'd like to thank both BobC and cos1776 for taking the time to consider the redirect question. I have aired this problem before and had no feedback. I appreciate knowing more about how these errors occurred and how difficult it might be to put them to rights. With the "St. Stephen" question I only outlined the first step of my attempts to improve these entries. Once the original red-linked entries are joined together into a "blue-linked place", I can go through them one by one moving them to the proper placename. But I am careful not to do the first redirect for a group that I do not have the time or the motivation to correct in a 24-hour period. I agree that the "Place:Unknown", "Place:Farmer", etc, are a different kettle of fish. The good news is that since 2012 the number of "Place:Farmer" entries has dropped by a couple of thousand. Someone has been helping WR by carrying out what must have been a very boring task. Regards, --Goldenoldie 10:04, 28 May 2017 (UTC)
When I first raised this topic 2-3 weeks ago the top 1000 of the Wanted List included places and sources wanted down to 46 uses. The score is now 45 uses, and looking through the individual entries at the bottom of the pile I spied some awfully simple corrections. However, I am wondering where "Werth" is. My curiosity may get the better of me soon, but improving New Brunswick, Canada, has priority at the moment. I notice St. Basile, NB, is a high red-link. --Goldenoldie 14:20, 3 June 2017 (UTC) I have been working with Wanted pages again. "School Teacher" was made a "place" and then each of its 45 entries was removed to the Description Box. Various other red-linked places in these entries were tidied up along the way. "School Teacher" is now awaiting speedy delete. Then I tackled Havre-Aubert, Isle de la Madeleine Quebec. Part of its problem was a missing comma, but this is compounded by its lack of French accented characters. Place:Havre-Aubert, Îles-de-la-Madeleine, Québec, Canada is in our list, so the one without the comma and accents has been redirected there, but I did not make any changes to the 157 individual entries. There may be errors amongst the natives of this surprisingly highly populated place, but knowledge of French-Canadian genealogy is not one of my strong points. Lastly I looked at Wanted place:Kortrijk. WR lists two Kortrijks--one in Belgium, one in the Netherlands. Would one of our Dutch contingent like to check these out? This note is just to show the variety of problems that can appear on the Wanted Pages List. /cheers, --Goldenoldie 14:40, 23 June 2017 (UTC)
Happy Sunday morning! I am very glad to report that there has been a significant dent in the Wanted pages list since last week. As my kids say, "I'd like to give a big shout out to" everyone who has really stepped it up this week to tackle that list. A couple of tips when you are working on these:
The next couple of weeks should continue to see dramatic improvements in cleaning up old bad place links. Eventually, I can imagine that this will only need to be monitored every few weeks or so for the rogue bad apple that slips in. Thanks again, --cos1776 14:38, 2 July 2017 (UTC) [add comment] [edit] Towns and Townships [23 June 2017]Hi Place Patrol members, I'm currently checking places in Ohio and surrounding states, making sure townships and other locations are accurate. County pages using the township designation are all listed in a section named "Township", whereas states (ie New York) using the equivalent "Town" do not have a separate listing, and are lumped into the "Inhabited Places" category. Thoughts ? Should the "Town" category be added to County pages ? Neal--SkippyG 15:10, 12 June 2017 (UTC)
I'll add a thought or two. Though both "township" and "town" may not be equivalent, both can contain villages, hamlets, boroughs, cities, etc. Especially in the early formation of counties, the "Town" may be the only identification of an area, before any village, etc. comes into being. Also, particularly in New England, a village is often of the same name as the town: a list of towns would be an easy survey of the county, and discourage selecting an Inhabited place over a Town.--SkippyG 21:55, 12 June 2017 (UTC)
Keeping in mind, all the concerns, etc. expressed, instead of creating a category "Towns" on each County page, is there any objection to adding "(town)" in those US states where applicable, without removing them from "Inhabited Place" ? I'm not absolutely sure what administrative or genealogical value "Towns" served in NE, but as far as "Townships" are concerned in Ohio, in the 1800s several special state census, and the oversee of some Vital Records experiments (1854-55) & 1865 were often conducted by Township Trustees mostly in the rural areas. Now these Trustees are primarily concerned with road & signage maintenance, snow removal, township buildings and public cemeteries. I've also seen "Town meetings" records in New York state, determining boundaries, conducting farm surveys, population surveys (w/o names), etc.Neal --SkippyG 16:44, 13 June 2017 (UTC)
Taking in all the discussion above, I plan on continuing to survey the states with "townships", adding (township) where needed to distinguish from an Inhabited Place, village, etc. I've also begun to do the same for states where "town" is a similar designation, only adding (town) to distinguish from other identically named places within the county (this occurs often in Township states, not as often in Town states). If I had my wish, I'd still like to see a "Town" category on the applicable County page. And...would like to see a small notice on the Main page when a policy is adopted or amended, linked to the change. This could apply to a statement re: township vs. town; most likely would apply to committees other than Place Patrol, but could serve as "educating" contributors. Neal--SkippyG 16:42, 23 June 2017 (UTC) [add comment] [edit] To redirect or not to redirect - that is the question [28 June 2017]I have learned something interesting over the last couple of days that has caused me to rethink my position on whether or not redirecting incorrect Place page titles to correct Place page titles is a good solution for us to update old incorrect and unlinked Place entries. As a result, I updated some of my previous comments in the Wanted pages section above. While it is true that a redirect will not immediately update the original text entered in the Place field, it appears that it will eventually update the text the next time the page is opened and closed. This will happen regardless of whether or not any editing is done or the page is actively saved. (Ex. I opened and closed Person:Silas Collins (1) without doing anything else, and now the text in his birth Place field is updated to reflect the redirect and his left menu "Surname in Place" search works.) So, now we know that redirecting does have the potential to eventually put the preferred data into the Place field with a pipe, in addition to creating a working link. That is good. But it also means that pages that receive no attention (of which there are many) will remain in a sort of limbo and not be browsable by the Place intended until someone or something opens them. One could argue that they are that way now, so redirecting is doing no harm, but it also means that the old text is still what is displayed. Sometimes this is no big deal, but sometimes it leaves the reader with incomplete or misleading information. My thinking on this now is that the best way to fix a bad link is still to edit it directly. That is still the cleanest way. This can be done in batches, as long as you are sure that each change you are making is appropriate. It is more informative and helpful to our readers to replace something like "Saugatuck, MI" with "Saugatuck, Allegan, Michigan, United States", instead of leaving "Saugatuck, MI" there with a hidden redirect. The next best method is to use the redirect, as long as you are sure that
I would very much like to hear some feedback on this, especially if I am missing something. If you think we should implement a policy one way or the other on the use of redirect with Place names, please weigh in. There has been a lot of redirecting going on lately as there has been a burst of energy directed at the Wanted pages list. I think the enthusiasm is great and the attention is much appreciated. Let's make sure that we are all on the same page and are very clear about what we think is best when it comes to handling these old bad place links within the context of our current program. Thanks, --cos1776 14:53, 28 June 2017 (UTC) I've been using redirect lately in the Midwest. If the list of "What Links.." is short, I've tried changing the place before I redirect. I haven't encountered a long list yet. The stickiest situation I've encountered is when a dependent cemetery and the township where it was located were BOTH incorrect, with about a dozen burials in the cemetery. That required some time.--SkippyG 15:48, 28 June 2017 (UTC) Your note encouraged me to do a bit more redirecting this evening. You will now see lines through places in Quebec, Nova Scotia, and one in England. There are a lot of places which, in their correct form, are in our database; it is only necessary to add a comma and/or the country to include these people in the place where they ought to be. I usually check the county list before making the redirect. The red-linked places in Québec have usually been described as in "Quebec" by anglophones who didn't see the need for an acute accent (or didn't know where to find it on their keyboards). I have now added Quebec, Canada as an alternate name for Québec, Canada. Just to make more confusion for us with limited knowledge of French, Québec is a city and a county as well as a province. I have been chasing around looking for acute-accented "e's" to copy and paste for 2-3 hours. We also decided to use Saint and Sainte rather that the usual "St". Then there is the more serious problem of Acadia which has been declared a county of Quebec in WeRelate. Acadia was located geographically in Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick. Some users have contributed a great many Acadians to our database. We must give some thought to where these people really ought to be. If you don't know the history of Acadia, read the Wikipedia article.--Goldenoldie 21:55, 28 June 2017 (UTC) [add comment] [edit] Samuel Waggoner (9) [1 July 2017]Hi fellow Place Patrollers, I tried correcting places on the page for Samuel Waggoner. I keep getting a message that the corrections can not be processed, possibly because the page is jammed with sources, etc. Could someone take a look and advise ? This is beyond my skill set. Neal--SkippyG 16:07, 29 June 2017 (UTC) Thanks for the response, Goldenoldie. I tried copying a chunk of Property references, then trying to delete those on his page, hoping it would free-up the edit process. Nope, not allowed. I'm considering creating another Samuel Waggoner page, then reconfiguring all the sources, notes (most link to place pages, seemingly for an unknown purpose, and My Source references for publications already in the WR catalogue) and dates with links simply marked "Other" w/o explanation.....then deleting everything and redirecting. If someone has another "method", please speak up, otherwise I'll talk to everyone in late July or early August...maybe {;>)--SkippyG 00:51, 30 June 2017 (UTC) I can see the problem. The information provider certainly wanted to tell us a lot. Would it be possible to rework all the property deals into a list that could be put into "Personal Details"? Then maybe add another paragraph of offices held? Etc? I would do this outside WR and then do a bulk delete when you are ready to replace all the current sources with the Personal Details material. It's a lot of work, but it might improve the use of computer memory. There are bound to be other suggestions. Good luck, --Goldenoldie 18:22, 29 June 2017 (UTC)
I'm going to create the new page for Samuel Waggoner and place the basics (bmd) in for tonight, and tackle the rest tomorrow. If I can pull the rest of the info, delete that info from the original and merge, great. If not, I don't believe I can even do a Speedy Delete. Cross that bridge when I come to it.....--SkippyG 01:48, 30 June 2017 (UTC) Could an admin try deleting Samuel Waggoner (9) ? I've created a new page Samuel Waggoner (10), and saved some details to be added after a little more digging. #redirect and Speedy Delete did not work. Thanks Neal--SkippyG 06:17, 1 July 2017 (UTC) Glad to see you've handled it this far. regards, --Goldenoldie 06:28, 1 July 2017 (UTC)
Thanks, everyone, for all help/suggestions, especially the unspoken reassurance that cleaning up this page was not impossible. As I said, I have more to add from the list I created, once I find backup for some of the statements made on the original page. I believe I can access the Deeds on my next trip to my local library, and retrieve quotes from the histories mentioned. Also, I have a few Census records to look at and cite for a better "take" of Samuel, wife & children, many of whom have Est December birthdates; odd. Happy Saturday...Neal--SkippyG 16:53, 1 July 2017 (UTC) [add comment] [edit] Something fishy in Denmark [22 August 2017]Hi Patrol!
These 2 pages are duplicates for the same location, and you can see this same pattern repeated for several Danish counties. It looks like this was done with a combination of renaming and duplicating existing place pages. I'm not sure how extensive the problem is. I can understand (sort of) why this happened, since the instructions posted for titling places in Denmark are not adequately explained and the existing hierarchy was not finished (i.e. the parishes should all have been "Also located in" their appropriate hundred). It is very unfortunate that the users did not run this by the patrol or the watercooler first before proceeding, as that would have saved us all a lot of time. Undoing and cleaning this up and adequately documenting the preferred titling method to prevent this from happening again is going to be a big task, but it will make a big difference in ensuring that the Person pages are being linked to the correct locations. Would any members of the patrol (or others) be interested in taking on this cleanup project for Denmark? Regards, --cos1776 14:45, 22 August 2017 (UTC) |